With the top bit of the camera's part selected, I used the shell to extrude it outwards a little, and converted it to polygon. I then deleted the lower side of it in the shell pull-down by using "select inner faces" and then converted the whole thing to poly. If you then select faces, the inner part will be selected (since you don't see this, it might as well not be there, and it saves memory). I selected the edges around the top part and used a slight Chamfer on it, followed by editing its smooth groups, so that it looked as a whole (Fig07). I did a lot of chamfering because there was going to be quite some reflection on it, especially on the black parts, and it gave a nicer, softer reflection transition than when using hard edges. With the new Mental Ray you can have this as a special effect, rather than real geometry, but I prefer it this way in case I want to use another renderer which doesn't have that same special effect. I used the same trick on the other pieces of the camera as well. And for the "mouth" part (and later also on the earplugs) I used Boolean to cut out the little holes in the mouth, and again chamfered the edges - it's all in the details! Now, if you notice, on the real camera there is a seam running around the sphere. To achieve that I just attached all the geometry that should have that seam into one polygon object, and then deleted half by selecting the faces, and mirrored the half. I then moved one half so that it was just slightly offset.

Fig. 07

The inner part of the camera was just basically tubes copied a couple of times and set in the right position, with a small sphere in the middle (Fig08 - 09) - and that was the head.

Fig. 08

Fig. 09

The rest of the geometry was really just old-fashioned box modelling. I started out with a box, sliced edges into it and formed the shape of the models, making sure to make the topology so that I could later on easily detach the parts that were supposed to be black, from the parts that were supposed to be grey (as you can see in the images). I also made sure to make an extra edgeloop somewhere, so that I could use the open chamfer tool to make the seams (with small, plastic things there are almost always seams somewhere) (Fig10 - 12).